Catalog Choice, a nonprofit organization that works to reduce the number of repeat and unwanted catalog mailings, is holding a new competition to "discover, recognize, and reward efforts to move nonprofit fund-raising efforts in a paperless direction."

Charities can enter the Paperless Choice Challenge beginning on June 15. The deadline for all entries is September 15.

With money donated by the Overbrook Foundation, the competition will award a first prize ($5,000) and an honorable mention ($1,000) for the best digital fund-raising campaign by charities that compete in categories based on the size of their budget: small ($1-million or less), medium ($1-million to $5-million), and large ($5-million or more).

Additional awards will be given for the most innovative paperless fund-raising campaign, and charities of any size may compete for those prizes, which also come with a cash award...

When Polly Aris Stamatopoulos directed fund raising at a gay-rights organization, she recalls that "on more than one occasion, I was asked to send a young, attractive guy to meet with an older male donor" at the donor's request. To protect her staff members, she says, "the decision I made was to send myself."

Ms. Stamatopoulos, now a fund-raising consultant in Washington, says that sexually charged incidents involving development officers are so common that "there should be a class on the sexual politics of fund raising."

Unwanted advances or even sexual harassment on the job are common complaints. As the Minneapolis consultant Bruce Flessner says, "These situations are not uncommon, unfortunately."

I have noticed the same thing in 20 years of covering fund raising and hearing such concerns. One woman, who asked me to withhold her name, described two instances in which male donors ...

Jocelyn Harmon, director of nonprofit services for Care2, an online network that helps people interact with charities they care about, says she reviews at least 10 nonprofit Web sites every day. That's why she can say with some authority that most of them are doing a very bad job of seeking online donations.

In her personal blog about nonprofit marketing, Ms. Harmon offers her concerns. Among them: charities that have no pictures on their site or bad stock photos of people who are not part of the organization.

Others, she says, have "way too much text" on their site. "Do not include a "letter from your executive director" unless he or she is famous," she advises. "Instead, consider doing a three-minute podcast or video so people can hear what your organization is all about. Keep it short and sweet and make it good."

Ms. Harmon also takes groups to task for featuring outdated content. ...

Several charities have told The Chronicle that it's taking them longer to receive money they were promised in donors' wills because it is so hard to sell the real estate and other items donors left when they died. 

Even when the properties do sell, the price is often substantially lower than it was before the real estate market started to plummet in 2007.

Fund raisers blame double-digit declines in bequest income at the American Heart Association (down 14 percent) and the Nature Conservancy (down 20 percent) on the crash of the real-estate market.

Harvard University is even harder hit: Most real-estate sales over the past two years have generated about 25 percent less than they would have before the economic downturn, according to Charles W. Collier, a senior philanthropic adviser at the university.

Has your organization faced a drop in bequest income because of the sluggish...

Adam Christing, a professional comedian in Los Angeles, is organizing a series of comedy shows to help World Vision, the international relief charity, recruit donors who make a monthly gift of $35 to sponsor a needy child overseas.

In his effort, called Laugh For a Change, Mr. Christing has persuaded seven other professional comedians to join him in performing their routines, with the goal of signing up 10,000 new sponsors this year for World Vision. He said he came up with the idea because he wants to help lift children overseas out of poverty while at the same providing some comic relief for domestic audiences who have been sorely challenged in tough economic times.

The "humanitarian humorists" are offering the comedy performances for church congregations and community groups—a fitting audience since World Vision is a Christian relief organization, and many of its donors are regular ...

The economy's improvement is finally making itself felt in philanthropy, as one of the nation's biggest charities on Wednesday reported an unprecedented increase in donations made in recent months.

The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, the third largest organization on The Chronicle's Philanthropy 400 survey of the nation's most successful fund-raising organizations, reported that contributions rose to $270-million in the first quarter of this year—up 109 percent over the same period in 2009.

It was the best first quarter for fund raising at Fidelity since the charitable fund was founded in 1991. The gift fund enables donors to set up charitable giving accounts and help make grants from them.

Fidelity said that the number of new accounts established in the first quarter of this year grew by 145 percent compared with the same period last year.

Forty-six percent of contributions to...

E. Burr Gibson, 83, the former executive chairman of Marts & Lundy, in Lyndhurst, N.J., has died.

After serving as a fund raiser for the March of Dimes for 16 years, Mr. Gibson joined Marts & Lundy in 1964. He was the first consultant at the firm to serve several nonprofit organizations at once. Previously, consultants were "resident managers," who literally moved to an institution and worked there fulltime for a year or more to manage a fund-raising campaign.

In 2008 Mr. Gibson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for his contributions to the fund-raising profession.

Some experts predict that, when the next Giving USA tally of philanthropy comes out in a few weeks, the research will show another drop in giving for 2009, on top of a record decline in 2008.

Not Bob Hartsook. The Kansas City, Mo., fund-raising consultant projects that giving actually increased last year by about 2 percent, because, he writes, "2009 was the year that it was embarrassing to be successful." As a result, he says, many large gifts were not reported or acknowledged last year.

He cites three big donations he knows about personally that aren't being reported, including an $80-million gift last year from a Southern family whose holdings include a company that has laid off people and frozen salaries because of the recession.

If that gift had been reported publicly, notes Mr. Hartsook, it would have been the 12th largest gift on The Chronicle's Philanthropy 50 list of biggest...

For the past two years, Christopher Davenport, a filmmaker at 501 Videos, a Seattle company that makes documentaries and videos for nonprofit organizations, has offered a free weekly video on fund raising.

Movie Mondays, as the series is known, provides free three- to five-minute videos every week on fund-raising topics such as arranging a visit with a donor, using humor to connect with board members, and seeking gifts through e-mail.

To commemorate the release of his 100th fund-raising video on May 17, Mr. Davenport is asking viewers to help him decide which ones deserve to be featured in a "top 10" DVD of the videos that will given away free to those who weigh in on the decision.

To encourage fund raisers to vote, Mr. Davenport has created an online survey.

When Susan G. Komen for the Cure and KFC, the fast-food chain best known for its buckets of "finger lickin' good" fried chicken, decided to start a new fund-raising effort, they probably never expected the deal would cause so much indigestion.

With its Buckets for the Cure promotion, KFC will donate 50 cents to Komen for every bucket of chicken sold in more than 5,000 outlets through May 9.

The promotion, which started April 5, guarantees that Komen will receive at least $1-million, and up to $8.5-million, depending on sales. For the promotion, KFC is selling chicken in pink buckets that bear the names of breast-cancer survivors and other women who died from the disease. To date, according to KFC, it has raised nearly $1.8-million.

But the money and commemorative touches have done nothing to quell criticism about the ties between the charity and a company that sells fat-laden foods,...